Cornelis Dusart

When Adriaen van Ostade died in Haarlem in 1685, the town's best-known painter of peasant life left behind a studio full of drawings and unfinished pictures. They passed to his last pupil, Cornelis Dusart, then 25. Dusart finished some of those panels, reworked and sold many of the drawings, and went on painting taverns, village fairs and card players from his master's models.

He was the son of the organist of St Bavo, Haarlem's great church, and was admitted to the painters' guild before he turned 20. In the early 1680s his prints and drawings began to borrow from Jan Steen, the painter of rowdy Dutch households. Some of his finest work is on paper, single peasants drawn in coloured chalk and watercolour, finished enough to be sold as pictures in their own right.

Dusart never married and seems to have been often ill. He died in Haarlem in 1704, aged 44, and four years later his estate was sold there, including a large collection of paintings by other masters.